Sunday, December 16, 2007

Logo #133: Con-Dom

Created by Mike Dando in 1983. Dando's noise assault unit Con-Dom has been active for almost 25 years, not so much pushing the envelope as destroying and utterly mutilating it. This logo depicts a stress position in which captives are placed so that their captors may better annihilate their wills; in his MTV/MySpace appearance on 4 December 2007, presidential candidate John McCain described this technique's use on him as a hostage of VietCong elements during 'Nam. From my review of the Con-Dom live action on 6 August 2005 in San Francisco at the San Francisco Bay Area Harsh Noise Fest: "Con-Dom employs two vocal microphones and projections of films of Martin Luther King Jr., KKK rallies and the civil rights struggle. He strips to the waist and smears white- and black-face over his body – then over the faces of aghast concert-goers. Confronting the audience directly with emotional trigger-words crawling along the more racial end of the spectrum, he's attacked by a petite girl who doesn’t want to take his shit. He keeps on going regardless, rampantly frottaging another girl as the shrieking feedback mounts and the hateful coda of NIGGER, NIGGER, NIGGER, NIGGER, NIGGER plays on in a loop. Regrettably, sound problems preclude the nuances of what he has to say, and yet it must be remembered that Con-Dom = control-domination and all the mediation, ironically enough, thereat."